New exhibition unearths stories and science behind world-first naturalistic garden

‘It’s such a choreographed thing to create this wildness within all these measured and tamed and ordered spaces,’ says artist Keg de Souza. 

This tension between the messy beauty of nature and the bound structure of a designed garden is at the heart of The Measured Garden – a new exhibition at the Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne.  

Alongside artefacts and botanical illustrations from the University’s Burnley archives, the exhibition presents photography from current plant trial research underway at the University’s horticulture campus at Burnley.

These plant trials, led by Associate Professor Claire Farrell with Dr Dean Schrieke, are part of a first-of-its-kind research collaboration between the University and the Melbourne Arts Precinct Corporation (MAP Co), designed to support the success of the future Laak Boorndap, an 18,000 square metre naturalistic rooftop garden planned as part of the Melbourne Arts Precinct Transformation project.   

As part of this art-meets-science collaboration, Sydney-based artist Keg de Souza and Melbourne-based artist Francis Carmody were invited by MAP Co curator Julia Murphy to participate as artists-in-residence, with access to Burnley’s scientists and archives, to create works in response to the plant trial research.

Two new artwork series created as part their residencies – Carmody’s Compressions and de Souza’s Garden of Strategies – are on display in the exhibition.

‘The title The Measured Garden encapsulates the literal measuring of these plants and this really rigorous scientific experimentation going on at Burnley,’ says Murphy, the exhibition’s curator, ‘as well as the complications that come up with botanical collections – which are another form of measuring and categorising plants.’

‘There are all of these other histories and knowledges that are overlooked in those collections.’

Magic lanterns, hidden treasures, contextualising the collector 

As part of her residency, Keg de Souza was naturally drawn to explore Burnley’s rich archives.  

‘A lot of my practise has looked at the movement of plants through Empire,’ says de Souza, ‘and how that’s changed land and landscapes across the world.’ 

The magic lantern slides date from the early twentieth century. The now-defunct teaching tools would have slotted into a magic lantern projector, lighting up a wall in a lecture theatre in days gone by. 

The slides feature hand-painted varieties of rose in yellow, orange, red, in bright and soft pinks. In between them, detailed black and white drawings of the roots, fronds, pods and flowers of cultivated plants are labelled with their French name in block letters: PETIT-POIS (pea), FOUGERE (fern), FROMENT (wheat).

The subjects of the slides tell a story about the types of plants that were considered worth learning about in days gone by, and – as de Souza points out – reveals the highly Eurocentric approach to botany in the early days of horticultural research and teaching.      

The tiny objects were some of the first to pique de Souza’s curiosity and ended up being the inspiration for her series Garden of Strategies.  

De Souza’s series features eight thirty-centimetre square double-layered glass slides, each featuring a pressed plant selected from the 128 species of plants currently being tested as part of the plant trials at Burnley – a subset of the about 470 plants that are part of the garden design for Laak Boorndap. Around the pressed plant specimen, different snippets of knowledge about the plant appear, written in fine, black block letters – stories interconnected with dotted lines.  

The eighth slide lies atop an overhead project on the floor, lighting up the neatly written titbits of scientific knowledge and cultural history related to Ceratostigma Plumbaginoides or ‘Leadwort’.   

The notations include horticultural observations and plant trait categorisations that de Souza has discovered through conversations with Dr Dean Schrieke as part of her residency at Burnley, as well as fragments of other stories unearthed through her own research. 

One fascinating note explains the etymological history of Leadwort, which linked the lead-like colour of the plant to its presumed medicinal use for treating lead poisoning in mediaeval times, as part of what was known as the ‘Doctrine of Signatures’.   

‘I’m really interested in these untold stories or these lesser-known narratives and trying to find those,’ says de Souza. ‘I had very clear intentions of highlighting the research going on at Burnley in some way that would bring it to a broader public audience.’ 

Putting things into boxes: Burnley and The Plant Trials  

The plant trial research at Burnley is referenced in Francis Carmody’s series Compressions, also on display in The Measured Garden. 

Plate-sized compressed ‘tiles’ of beeswax and volcanic gravel-like scoria bear the form of graphic data visualisations from the research, their dirt-spots and pock-marks signs of weathering from their former home embedded in the Test Garden at Fed Square, hidden between the plants. 

On another wall in the exhibition, the research is represented by a series of photographs. 

A collection of four aerial photos of Burnley’s rooftop testing garden show three different garden beds at various stages of growth. Next to them, other photographs have captured the garden pre-planting: pink dots forming a grid over the soil, marking out where the plants will be placed.  

This rooftop garden-in-a-box was designed to mimic the conditions of the future Laak Boorndap garden – which will be constructed on an elevated deck connecting some of Melbourne’s major arts institutions, including the new Fox: NGV Contemporary and Arts Centre Melbourne, on the south side of the Yarra River – and to test how plants respond in different types of soil, with different amounts of watering, and how they respond in communities of plants rather than as individuals.  

On the opposite wall – photos of the plant leaves appear next to a ruler on a black background.  

‘Because my research is focused on selecting plants to solve problems in cities and make them more liveable, most of my work comes down to plant trait frameworks,’ explains Associate Professor Claire Farrell, a research scientist at Burnley and head of the arts precinct plant trial research project. ‘Understanding how a plant allocates its resources to different tissues and organs, it means I can extrapolate how I think that plant will adapt to a certain planned urban context. 

‘It’s our way of trying to condense a lot of information into something we can generalise. Investigating these relationships that scale with rainfall gradients, looking at leaf thickness and area ratios: it’s our way of trying to get something that we can interpret.’ 

Evidence of this painstaking research will be invisible in the future Laak Boorndap garden, just as it is in the current Test Garden at Fed Square – another experimental, naturalistic garden constructed on the roof of a car park, which has been built to test how people will engage with the much larger Laak Boorndap rooftop garden being built across the road. 

Photos of the flourishing Test Garden feature in The Measured Garden, juxtaposed against the plant trial research images – another reminder of the hidden research that makes the seemingly-wild beauty of the colourful, flowering garden possible. 

Laak Boorndap’s design, like the Test Garden, includes a mix of native plants and introduced species from all over the world – as de Souza says – in a highly choreographed arrangement of plant communities, yet inspired by the beauty of nature.   

From a research perspective at Burnley – this is a long way from roses and peas.  

‘For us,’ says Farrell, ‘this is definitely groundbreaking to be looking at plants that come from very different ecosystems and very different parts of the world and have different functional strategies. What happens when we put them together? And does it behave the way we think it will?’